Gerd Leonhard’s thoughts, finds and other comments on the future of ethics in a digital world

Look at it this way: a hundred years ago this interview would have happened with pen and paper through letters. Think of how much detail is lost through that method of communication. We could turn out a meaningful dialogue, but the emotional content would be largely lost. Today we are having it on a telephone, so you have an added layer of understanding through my voice, my enthusiasm, how I say things.

Then, if we have this conversation face to face, you can add even more detail. How my face looks as I speak, my hand gestures and so on.

Now, imagine if we spoke brain to brain and you could actually feel how I was feeling, understand what it is I am trying to say. You would know exactly what i am trying to tell you.”

“Silicon Valley’s biggest failing is not poor marketing of its products, or follow-through on promises, but, rather, the distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry. Two years ago, on my blog, I wrote, “It is important for us to talk about the societal impact of what Google is doing or what Facebook can do with all the data. If it can influence emotions (for increased engagements), can it compromise the political process?””

“Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening beyond that.”

“You can go further. In the accounts given by philosophers like Bernard Stiegler, the human stands on the point of vanishing entirely; we become something incidental to a total technological system. As he points out, a human being without any technological prostheses is nothing, an unsteady sac of flesh defined only by what it doesn’t have: no shelter, no protection, no society. We create tools, but technical apparatuses and their milieus advance according to their own logic, and these non-living objects have their own strange form of life. Our brains developed to control our hands; human consciousness itself was only the by-product of a technical evolution that moved from flint-knapping to the hammer to the virtual bartender; its real job isn’t to perform any particular task but to perpetuate itself. “Robots,” he writes, are “seemingly designed no longer to free humanity from work but to consign it either to poverty or stress.””

“Memorial bots — even the primitive ones that are possible using today’s technology — seemed both inevitable and dangerous. “It’s definitely the future — I’m always for the future,” she said. “But is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? Where is the line? Where are we? It screws with your brain.””

“The Cultured Beef Project aims to create artificial meat in the laboratory. Technicians remove muscle cells from the shoulder of a cow, and feed the cells with a nutrient mix in a Petri dish, and they grow into muscle tissue. From a few starter cells one can derive tens of tons of meat. The whole world could be fed with meat from muscle cells grown in a lab.

In 2013 the cost of lab–grown meat for a hamburger was $325,000. By 2016 it had dropped to below $50. The biggest obstacle so far is not technology but the taste–that is unlike what people are used to because blood, fat, and connective tissue are missing. But researchers are working to improve that. The slogan of a similar company, Modern Meadow, says that the “future is cultured, not slaughtered”.”

“Ethics is about having an intelligent discussion, not about answers, as such—it's about having the tools to think carefully about real-world actions and their effects, not about prescribing what to do in any situation. Discussion leads to values that inform decision-making and acti”

“Kate Crawford, an AI researcher with Microsoft Research New York, MIT, and NYU, told The Intercept, “I‘d call this paper literal phrenology, it’s just using modern tools of supervised machine learning instead of calipers. It’s dangerous pseudoscience.”

Crawford cautioned that “as we move further into an era of police body cameras and predictive policing, it’s important to critically assess the problematic and unethical uses of machine learning to make spurious correlations,” adding that it’s clear the authors “know it’s ethically and scientifically problematic, but their ‘curiosity’ was more important.””

“But the really worrying thing is that the Internet, which most of us heralded as a way to bring truth to the masses, is in fact turning into a horribly efficient way of delivering carefully crafted lies to the most vulnerable members of society, namely the gullible or poorly educated (often the same individuals).”

“Mr. Obama, who rode many of these digital tools to the presidency, was accommodative of their rise; his administration broadly deferred to the tech industry in a way that bordered on coziness, and many of his former lieutenants have decamped to positions in tech.

Mr. Trump’s win promises to rip apart that relationship. The incoming president had few kind words for tech giants during the interminable campaign that led to his victory. Mr. Trump promised to initiate antitrust actions against Amazon, repeatedly vowed to force Apple to make its products in the United States, and then called for a boycott of the company when it challenged the government’s order to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone. Mr. Trump’s immigration plans are anathema to just about every company in tech.”

Digital Ethics by Futurist Gerd Leonhard

Gerd Leonhard, Futurist and Humanist, Author, Keynote Speaker, CEO The Futures Agency, Zurich / Switzerland
Gerd Leonhard is a hunter and gatherer of human values from the future. From culture and society to commerce and technology, Gerd brings back the news from the future so business and society leaders can make better choices right now. In his latest book, Technology vs Humanity, Gerd explores the key ethical and social questions which urgently require an answer before we increasingly abdicate our very humanity. For organizations in the grip of disruption, Gerd supplies visionary insights and concentrated wisdom that informs key decisions makers today. A musician by origin, Gerd Leonhard has now redefined the vocation of futurist as a new humanist.
Gerd was listed as one of the top 100 influencers in technology by Wired magazine (2015).